The Postmortal

by Drew Magary

  Resnick: Do you wish he had never discovered the cure?

  Otto (pausing): Sometimes. But wishing is a fool’s errand, isn’t it? There’s only one reality, and that’s the reality that I have to deal with. I think a lot of people mistakenly hoped the cure would end not only death but also the anguish of processing death, of processing finality. I think people thought they would be able to escape that, and the opposite has proven true. They have to spend much longer dealing with their grief.

  Resnick: Are you scared the discovery of Skeleton Key will also give people a false sense of security?

  Otto: Yes. And that’s why I very nearly threw away the initial prototype.

  Resnick: I bet you never thought you’d one day be on the verge of perfecting a cure for cancer, and then wonder if it was a bad thing.

  Otto: I know. It’s insane that we’ve gotten to this point. But it’s a legitimate thing to think about. Is it a good thing to eliminate an illness, or many illnesses, that are devastating on an individual scale but necessary in the grand scheme of nature? And, if we’re being honest, why am I trying to develop something that will help all these other people? We now live in a world where I think many people walk around asking themselves, do other people matter? Does the rest of the world mean anything to me, or is all that matters this very small world of friends and family and colleagues that I’ve constructed for myself? It’s easy to navigate that minefield of questions and come to the conclusion that this vaccine is a bad thing.

  Resnick: So why didn’t you destroy the vaccine?

  Otto: Because deep in my heart I know you can’t stop progress. Ever. There are plenty of private labs out there working on something similar. You think Michael Ornster doesn’t have forty people working on this over at Delvair?

  Sooner or later this vaccine will be perfected, and it is going to be used, both for good and ill. You can’t stop people from doing what they want to do. That’s a realization I had a long time ago—one that came back to me when I was standing on a bridge, ready to throw the prototype down onto the rocks below. I remembered when I married my wife . . .

  Resnick: Your current wife.

  Otto: I’ve only had one. No cycle marriages for me. Anyway, I remember all the wedding planning we did, and we were scurrying around to bakeries and caterers and God knows where else. And my wife was having panic attacks on the day of the wedding. She’d say to me, “Steve! Do not let the guests switch the place cards!” And she’d order the ushers to make sure all the guests signed both the guestbook and some special photo that we had placed on a table in the foyer. Of course, the guests didn’t obey any of our little commands. They switched seats and never bothered to sign the picture, and not everyone danced on the dance floor. I think after about six glasses of champagne, my wife finally decided that there was no use in trying to stop it. That she may as well enjoy the day instead of trying to make sure everyone acted exactly as she wished. You can’t stop people from doing what they want to do. They’re always going to do it. Mankind has a path for itself, a trajectory, and you can never knock it off of that course. All I can do is usher in this vaccine in the most responsible manner I can. After that I have to have faith that people will be as well-intentioned as I am.

  Resnick: But hasn’t this century been proof positive that they aren’t?

  Otto: To a degree. But there is still some good out there, Micah. Not everyone took the cure and decided to become a crazed goon. A breakthrough like this will solve the organ theft problem, at the very least. Perhaps this is the key to turning everything around. That’s what I have to hope for. I have to.

  Resnick: Do you wish your father were still alive to see some of the breakthroughs you’ve made?

  Otto (choking up): I wish he were still alive. Period. That’s all.

  Resnick (narrating): Steven Otto believes Skeleton Key could be ready by 2070. But just today Nobel Prize–winning bioroboticist Lars Anderssen said Otto’s timetable is wishful thinking, and that a vaccine with Skeleton Key’s abilities may never be possible. Either way, Steven Otto will continue working on his vaccine, to improve upon the cure his father gave the world. For better and for worse. As for Buggle the dog, he died from stomach cancer in September 2042.

  DATE MODIFIED:

  6/23/2059, 4:31 A.M.

  “They don’t think this is the end of it”

  From Darian Clark at G9 (and everywhere else):

  Breaking: Massive Explosions in China

  By Darian Clark

  Three massive, nuclear-scale explosions in China were detected by U.S. and Russian satellite imagery just one hour ago. The explosions appear to be centered on the cities of Ürümqi, Harbin, and Linfen. U.S. military operatives say no incoming missiles from outside of China were detected prior to the blasts. The three cities share a combined population of nearly sixty-five million people.

  ANBC has some of the satellite images up right now. You can see the caps of the mushroom clouds growing and eclipsing any topographical features of the landscape. I went to check the feeds, but connections are slow all over the place because everyone else is doing the exact same thing. I managed to get through once and see a handful of messages posted.

  DerrickOLE32: DUDE, CHINA JUST NUKED ITSELF

  MartyBTV: Lookn @ China on the big WEPS right now. HOLY MOLY

  SeraFoster: I have a very good friend who lives in Linfen. If anyone has any information, PLEASE POST IT. Can’t get onto other feeds Grrrrrr!

  2000XiangXiangXiang: I’m in Hong Kong. Everyone’s panicking. They don’t think this is the end of it. Please post pics if you have them

  Farooq: Ürümqi is almost entirely Muslim. If China were going to nuke itself to control its population, that’s the first place they’d start. Jesus. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus

  HsangDuvoy12: My cousin lives far outside Harbin. He said he saw a flash out his window and then everything went dark. They’re in the basement right now. They don’t know when they should come out.

  DATE MODIFIED:

  6/24/2059, 10:34 P.M.

  “They just can’t help themselves”

  I tried to sleep but all I could see in my mind was a tangled day-mare of Greenies and Chinese mushroom clouds and very small robots and stern collectivist reverends and old postmortals drowning in the ocean. Drinking did little to stop the visions. I needed someone to talk to or just to be with. There’s only one option for that kind of companionship at three in the morning on a weeknight.

  The “friend” listings said Julia was a postmortal blonde escort available for house calls 24-7. Very few of the girls listed were available for house calls, so I pegged her as the best of the bunch. I pinged her and told her to meet me outside the apartment complex, so as not to wake up Scott, my roommate. I smoked a bowl of hydro, grabbed the Texan’s gun, shuffled down the stairs, and waited. This will sound pathetic, but I found myself excited to meet her. They have pictures up on those listings, but they never match what you end up getting. I felt like a nervous little kid going through puberty again, in all the good ways. Someone was going to pull up to my door, and I had no idea who. Something was going to happen.

  An hour later a ratty-looking plug-in cruised into the lot, and out stepped a girl who barely looked eighteen. She wore jeans and a small white camisole. I took one look at her and felt like a creepy old man. She locked pupils with me and hurried to the door, a small pistol in her hand. I held the door for her. We walked up the stairs and got to the apartment, not a word exchanged between us. I got her a bottle of water from the fridge and escorted her to the bedroom, turning on the light. She began taking off her pants. I stopped her. “Wait, wait.”

  “What?”

  I looked at her face. Outside, she looked like a teenager. Inside, under the lights, her skin looked artificially stretched. It had a blotted, bronze quality to it—the kind of skin you only get from sitting out in the baking sun for years and years without regard for the damage it’ll cause. You could see the flattened creases along her
jaw, like a pair of chinos that had been poorly ironed. I’ve seen a lot of girls lately with trophy-wife syndrome. Julia was no different. She was legitimately young and artificially young all at once.

  “How are old are you?” I asked.

  “I’m eighteen, sweetheart.”

  “No, I mean how are old are you really?”

  “Forty-two.”

  “Jesus.”

  I sat down on the bed. She plopped down next to me. “Eighteen’s my cure age,” she told me. “They paid me ten thousand dollars to get it.”

  “Who did?”

  “Franz Hornbacher.”

  “The designer?”

  “Yep. That’s the guy.”

  “So you were part of that whole Beautiful Town thing?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “It was so weird. One day I was walking along the street in Adams Morgan, when this really tall guy with a blond wig and red glasses walked up to me with about six people around him. He pointed at me and said, ‘She’s in. She has the look.’ He was eating a banana when he said it. He ate, like, thirty bananas a day. It was all he ate. I think it was for, like, virility.”

  “So just like that, it happened?”

  “Yep. They put me on a plane to some island in the Bahamas with a few other people he’d selected. Then they put us up in some bungalows and just kind of set us free.”

  “You didn’t have to do anything?”

  “They gave me the cure and told me to go be beautiful. They had film crews and design teams walking around the island all the time, taking photos of us, telling us to try on certain clothes, asking us if we’d consider sleeping with various other models on the island. Honestly, I spent so much time drinking champagne and snorting coke that I barely remember any of it. I remember Keith Richards visited one day, which blew my mind.”

  “How’d he look?”

  “Not bad. I think that’s his secret. Everyone expects him to look like a corpse, so when he shows up and looks somewhat alive, people are really impressed. It was a cool trick. He and Franz drove around the island in this gold golf cart, and Franz would be shouting at us from a megaphone all the time. ‘Hey, funboys, doesn’t it feel goooood to be beauuutiful?’ It was something.”

  “So, what happened? How come you didn’t stay?”

  “I couldn’t get pregnant. We found out later that that was the real reason Hornbacher brought us all down there. He was experimenting. He was trying to mix and match different people with different looks and to figure out what they’d produce. I think he was looking for some sort of ultimate breeding prize. He expected one of us to pop out some perfect, eternal muse for him to dote on forever. A clotheshorse. That’s why we were there. He was looking for a perfect blend of person.”

  “That’s creepy. Like a master race.”

  “Not quite that, but way creepy all the same. I mean, he wasn’t a white supremacist. But he was definitely a supremacist of some kind. There were blacks and Latinos and Brazilians and all kinds of people there. He was extremely snobby, and you never knew when he’d cast you off on a whim. One day they came up to me and told me to leave. Franz himself never said goodbye to me, even though we had nice conversations every once in a while. They flew me back to Dulles, gave me a check, and then left me in the terminal. They also never told me that your skin could still get sun damage, even if you got the cure.” She waved to her face. “The ten thousand dollars was barely a drop in the bucket compared to the lifting procedures.”

  “You look good.”

  “If the lights are dim enough. And you? How old are you, since you got to ask me?”

  “I’m sixty-eight. Twenty-nine’s my cure age.”

  “Not bad. You look good. You look your cure age.”

  I looked out the window. When I was hanging in Mexico with Keith, we’d sleep on the street at night sometimes. And I remember all the houses were set behind these crude concrete walls with shards of broken bottles sticking out at the top. I remember in Cuernavaca that even at 3:00 A.M. night never really became night. There were too many streetlights and too much haze in the air for the lights to reflect off of. Instead of a dark sky, the night there always maintained this bizarre ethereal glow. Phosphorescent—like a bug zapper hanging over your head. Now I could see that same glow out my window. It’s been there for a while. Night has become extinct here. The world never fully comes to a rest anywhere I go. I turned to Julia. “I don’t feel my cure age, truth to tell. Every morning I look in the mirror and see a body that’s a lie. I feel like this skin of mine is just a shell—that if you knocked against it, it would crack and chip. You could peel it away and all you’d see underneath would be a sick, wrinkled old man. This body is just a hiding place.”

  “At least you’re fully formed,” she said. “You’re a man. What am I? For the past two decades, I’ve been nothing more than jailbait. No one listens to a word I say because they think I still have the brain of a flighty little teenager. The only men who look my way are creeps looking for some barely legal action. No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  “I see the twenty-six- and twenty-seven-year-old women walking around and think, my God, those are women. Real women. Women who can wear a business suit and look professional. Women who have careers and cycle husbands and babies and all this shit I’ll never have.” She leaned in. “Do you know what the worst part of it is? I’m always acting my cure age. I can’t help it. I look eighteen, so I feel this urge to play the role or something like that. I get drunk. I act ditzy around boys. I was at a party a while back and this guy asked me a question about China and I pretended not to know anything about China, when I do. I know boat loads about China: Chairman Mao, Tiananmen Square, the open period, the return to isolationism. You know anyone in China? Lose anyone in the blasts?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Me neither. Still, I know all that stuff. But half the time I feel compelled to act like this stupid little girl.”

  “It’s like your body is dictating to your brain what role you should play.”

  “That’s right! I go read a book or something, and there’s this little voice in my head that says, hey, girl, why aren’t you out partying? But I got sick of that kind of thing ages ago. I stay in on a Friday night, and the girl in the mirror tells me that’s a lame thing to do. But I’m a forty-two-year-old woman. It doesn’t make any sense for me to go out raging. It doesn’t make any sense for me to wear tube tops—but my drawer is full of the stupid things. I don’t know . . . I just wish I had gotten the chance to become who I was meant to become.”

  She took a sip of water. I gave her space.

  “Why are you asking me these questions?” she said. “Don’t tell me you’re looking for a real girlfriend or something.”

  “No no. I’m not like that. Honest. It’s just . . . I couldn’t sleep, and I needed some company. I guess I’m lonely, even though I don’t think of myself like that.”

  “It’s okay. I get it.” The power went out again. We were left alone, bathed in the manmade glow from the working parts of the grid that seeped in from outside. “I spent two years living at this place called the Honey Ranch in LA,” she said. “It was run by some sleazeball porn guy. A real Joe Francis type. And all these actors and athletes used to come around to smoke bowls and get laid in the pool. Anyway, this porn-king guy lived there with his mother. His mother! This very dowdy-looking fifty-year-old lady. Maude. That was her name. I think she ran most of the financial aspects of the place. And she’d walk around from time to time while everyone was playing naked pool volleyball and all that. I used to stare at her. I couldn’t walk twenty feet through that house without having my ass grabbed. But Maude, no one bothered her. The men ignored her, and I guess that’s not always what you want when you’re a woman. But still, they left her alone. She had the freedom to walk around. And when guys talked to her, they talked to her. They didn’t stare at her tits and then whip out their IMDb credits. I thought that was, I don’t know—cool. I wo
uld have liked to have evolved to the point where I could be treated that way.”

  “You want to be fifty?”

  “Well, maybe not fifty. That’s pretty damn old.”

  “That it is.”

  “And what is it that you do, given that you know so much about me now?”

  “I’m an end specialist.”

  “Are you? Really?”

  “Kind of. I’m the consultant.”

  “How does it work? How do you kill them?”

  “With a shot. It’s painless.”

  “What’s it cost?”

  “It’s based on your income,” I told her. “Most of our revenue on lower-income clients comes from government subsidies.”

  “So if I don’t make all that much, you could do me for cheap. Right?”

  “Yeah, but you don’t want that.”

  “Says who?”

  “It’s a whole thing if you want this done. I need an RFE form filled out. I need a will. I need your license for clearance.”

  “I’ve got my license, and I don’t have jack shit to leave anyone.”